Great Strides
by iamnotyourbroom
Summary: There are certain processes which are irreversible, a domino effect falling closer to order as the rest of the universe falls into disorder. You're making great strides towards something akin to your own damnation. You wish you didn't love him.
1. Fixation

**Fixation**

" _It was love at at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight."_

― Vladimir Nabokov, _Lolita_

You don't know the name of the man on top of you, but you can't say that you wish you did. Your eyes are closed and you're biting back a name because you wish it was him fucking you instead of the stranger you picked up at a gay bar downtown. You're drunk enough that if close your eyes and keep on lying to yourself, you can believe it's really him. You don't remember a time when Bro wasn't occupying your mind, sitting there in his carved out space that you haven't managed to replace. He's been your entire life, your childhood, your hero, your greatest obsession. You used to think that all you needed was his approval, and when you felt hopeless to gain it, the need to _be him_ consumed you, until it mutated into something that needed to have him, to keep him, to touch him and feel him just to make him real.

When you reach orgasm, it's a hollow satisfaction, because what follows the afterglow is a painful glide back to reality, out of a fantasy world where everything is okay, where your perversion isn't sick at all, where guilt isn't even an afterthought, but here and now, you feel sick. If you had any less control, you might be crying for loss of being able to go back to the way things were, if it were even possible to identify how things were before and why it was better than this. You leave the man's bed, grabbing your phone and your shades after redressing, and get out of his apartment before he has the chance to ask why you're leaving. It's a one-night stand, but you don't have any commitments to even stay the whole night. You don't think you even could, being so close to someone who isn't Bro, just a hollow image and a warm body that you use to relieve your sexual tension..

It's close to four when you pull into the reserved parking of your apartment building. You probably shouldn't have been driving drunk, but you were sobering up anyway and you made it one piece. You walk up the stairs to your apartment instead of taking the elevator. Bro's been texting you since one-thirty, and you're really not in the mood to even look at him, much less face whatever he's got up his sleeve as soon as you walk through the door. You'd prefer to quash your emotions for now, hold them down and just get some fucking sleep before school tomorrow.

That won't happen, though. You stick your key in the door as quietly as you can, and slip in silently. Where did you put your sword? The apartment is silent, and Bro isn't in sight. You know that he's home because both Lil Cal's trunk and Bro's equipment is in the living room. You scan the area before moving carefully to the kitchen. If you're lucky, you can make it all the way to your room. You grab a random sword from the kitchen, then move towards the hallway. You're in the archway when Bro taps you on the shoulder from behind, making you spin around and block the first sword strike.

You're not going to hold long; you're (half) drunk and tired and you're not using your regular sword. Bro draws you out to the clear center of the living room. You duck under his, and block his swings the entire way, but you're shaky and disoriented. Your head feels heavy, and you're ready to just throw your arms up and give in. But you don't, because what follows a particularly humiliating defeat is just one more problem you don't want to deal with right now. Bro dances around you, giving you strikes you can dodge, but he's circling you like a goddamn shark circling around a drowning swimmer. It's making you dizzy. He tests you with a maneuver he taught you last week, which you're barely able to block. After a few more strikes, he distracts you with a swing to your right before he flashsteps to your left, and as you're turning to face him, he flashsteps again, able to fucking karate chop you in the brachial plexus, kick the back of your knees, and pull the edge of his sword up to your throat from behind you while you're down on your knees, still clutching your sword like it actually matters at this point.

His blade is millimeters away from your neck and you can feel Bro's presence above and behind you. You shouldn't be turned on by this. You really, really shouldn't be turned on by this. You swallow and he brings the blade away, allowing you to stand up and face him, still holding your sword. He sheathes his own.

"Where the fuck have you been?" He asks.

"Friend's house," you say. It's not entirely a lie.

"Did you drive home?" He crosses his arms. It's the only sign that he's being serious as all hell right now, and you're trying not to think about how attractive he looks. He noticed you're drunk. Fuck. You suppose it's kind of obvious, especially for someone perceptive like him. You really shouldn't have gone out on a Wednesday night. But you know what? It's getting harder to handle, having to hide and sneak out. The pressure is building, and you're getting close to just outright breaking.

"I'll call next time," you say.

"Like fuck you will. There will be hell to pay if I catch you drunk again." He turns and leaves you standing in the middle of the room.

You retreat to your own room, chucking the sword to the ground, followed by your shirt and your pants before you climb into bed. You plug your phone in, and lie awake, staring at the ceiling for a long time. You're tired as all hell, but you can't sleep.

As you lie there thinking, you wish there was a way to get rid of your feelings for Bro, find some way to be happy with someone your age, unrelated to you, but the years of trying to drive him out of your head have proved that you're stuck with him to your very core. Even if one day you find that you've fallen in love with someone, you wouldn't be surprised if they're just another replacement for Bro, a hollow projection that will leave you always wanting more. He is the Annabel to your Humbert Humbert, making your future bear a sickening likeness to the plot of _Lolita_ whether you want it to or not. At least you don't like twelve-year olds, just your older brother.

You don't go out for another week, but it makes being around Bro unbearable. It's like being told you can't eat your favorite food when you're starving, and it's dangling tantalizingly in front of you, but you also know that if you eat your favorite food, it will probably kick you out of the house and you'll be universally shunned forever or something. Well, you don't really know what Bro would do, but it's the sort of thing that's just don't do, because it's wrong. Basic human morality stuff. You don't kill people, because it's just fucking wrong. You don't make sexual advances towards you brother/legal guardian, because you can't.

Next friday, however, you can't take it anymore. You sincerely give zero fucks and you need to get out. You go out to your usual bar, order your usual drink, and look for a guy who might pass for being blonde, muscular, and twice your age. You find a man that fits one and a half of those qualifications and you take the bait. You sit next to him at the bar, make your usual small talk, get him to buy you a couple drinks, and this time, you don't even bother to go home with him. You take him straight into the bathrooms and get a quickie. He leaves you with a noticeable mark on your neck and you don't even care.

When you go home that night, Bro is on the futon watching a shitty inner-city Sesame Street rip off from the eighties, and you think the universe might truly hate you. He isn't ordinarily here on Friday nights. You wonder if maybe he stayed home just to see if you'd sneak out again, which of course you did, and of course he caught you. You also realize haven't eaten all today, on account that you haven't gone to the store this week to restock your closet. It's midnight, and you think maybe it's not even worth it to hide where you've been from Bro. You just don't give a flying fuck today.

You can sense Bro watching you from his place on the futon, but you're not bothered by it. You stroll right up to the fridge, open it, dodge a sword, grab a sweet golden beer from the door, and open it right in the kitchen with an audible pop of the cap. Bro is on you in a second, snatching it from you before you can raise it to your lips. He's so close to the counter that you can't help but shove him back, successfully knocking him against the counter with the element of surprise on your side. He doesn't outwardly show it, but you're close enough that you can see his eyes blaze with rage. You know he's about to do something, so you pull your right hand back and land a punch on Bro's face, just beneath the glasses, knuckles connecting with the left side of Bro's nose. At the same time, you snatch the beer from Bro's right hand. You take a victorious swig, which doesn't last long, but you can choke down about half the thing before Bro tears it back out of your hand, spins you around and shoves you back into the counter. The force is surprising, cracking a line of pain where the counter digs into your lower back.

"Have a heart, man. I'm already drunk," you say, squirming underneath Bro, whose hands are on either side of you, pushing you into the counter. It would be hot, if it weren't for the piercing anger being shot at you like daggers. You're protected by two layers of shades, but you can feel it. Aw, shit, who are you kidding, Bro is two inches away from you, pinning you into the counter; this is hot. This is definitely hot and if Bro was going to beat the shit out of you, he could at least have the decency to fuck your brains out first.

"Exactly. And now you think it's okay to do this shit? You didn't even bother _trying_ to hide it from me?" If you leaned up a little bit, you could do worse than punching him. You could kiss him. Right fucking there. He hisses in your ear, "and don't you dare think you can get away with punching me like that."

"I'm getting sick of hiding my weekly outings to gay bars just to get smashed and fuck some random dude. Oh yeah, good time to mention that I'm gay," you say, not even fully aware you're saying it until you see feel Bro's miniscule shifts in front of you. You should really shut up now.

Bro leans his face in close enough for you to feel the warmth of his breath on your face. It should be intimidating, but you're feeling more and more turned on by the second, your pants getting uncomfortably tight. "Is that where you've been going?"

"Gotta blow off steam somehow, what with this massive incest boner I've got going for you," you say, and that is the moment that Bro flinches in front of you. It's a small gesture, but you score another point, because you just freaked the fuck out of him. Now, you just want to keep making him squirm. "That Sigmund Freud would have a field day with, but I have to keep hiding. Or, I guess not, now. Not to mention the men twice my age I use as distractions, they're not working so well lately. I'm starting to not give a single flying fuck who's screwing me, whether troll or human or whatever the hell at this point, and believe me, I hate repeatedly explaining why I'm calling them 'Bro.'"

Bro tightens his grip at your sides, but you can see him realizing other implications the position could have, given your monologue just now. "Don't fuck with me right now," he says, his voice completely unaffected, but his movements slightly uncomfortable.

"I'm not. I actually want to ride your dick like a cowboy at the rodeo," you say, and in fact, you think that's your brain screaming at you, telling you to stop now, to take back every word and go back to hiding and fucking nameless men and pretending you're not royally fucked up. Bro just stares at you, boring holes into your own. You're waiting for a response.

"Grab your sword and meet me on the roof," he says, letting you go while somehow still slamming you back against the counter again. "Now."

You grab your sword from the wall in your room with reluctance, resigned to following Bro up the steps to the roof above, where you will fight pathetically in your drunkenness, and hope maybe this is all just some fucked up dream and you didn't just tell Bro all about how you have the hots for him. You have a very, very bad feeling about this, you think as you ascend the stairs to the warm night above.


	2. Entropy

**Entropy**

" _Be true to your Dick."_

― _Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita_

You were pissed. You were pissed right the fuck off, not because your kid just straight up told you he wants to fuck you, but because he thinks it gives him the right to not give a single flying fuck about rules. Not just your rules, laws, some of which can be downright idiotic, but he's seventeen and sneaking around to go to bars and sleep with men twice his age. He's showing up drunk and not even trying to hide it, which really gets to you because he _knows_ that you don't tolerate shit like that. The audacity of this kid is going to kill you, really.

Not to mention, your nose hurts like hell; he's going to pay for pulling a stunt like that. Although, you must say, his punch has improved. You don't feel as bad fighting him like this when he has at least a fighting chance against you. You should really talk about the whole "I wanna ride your dick like a cowboy at the rodeo" thing, but you decide to hold it off until after your strife. You're feeling a lot of things about it, a lot of things that you want to delay even thinking about until you've made your point about his outright defiance lately.

"Might as well just beat the shit out of me, dude. Can't fight for shit when I'm drunk," he says as he comes through the door, sword already drawn. You ignore him. He should know how to fight, no matter the circumstances.

He's prepared for the first strike against his sword, blocking with his own before side stepping out of the way, but he wobbles, and it's just plain sloppy defense. He tries to get the next strike, but you block it without half a thought and when your swords slide away from each other, you can instantly swing back in a slash that very nearly catches his abdomen. He jumps back, losing his balance momentarily when he does, but he regains it and tries to take the next swing at you. It's a stupidly easy move that would allow you to disarm him from here, but you're not ready to let the fight end, so you just aim for his shoulder, nicking it.

It's enough to distract him for the half-second it takes you to kick his legs out from under him, sending him straight onto his ass. You slash at him below, but he has quick enough reflexes to both block and roll to the side all at once. There's not much he can do at this point, but he takes the opportunity to throw himself at your legs, taking ahold of one of them, blocking your strike from above with his other hand. He almost successfully makes you lose your balance, but you use the leverage from his hand to kick his face, a low blow at this point, but he's there and he punched you earlier so you can't really say you're sorry. His shades get pressed against his face, he looks visibly hurt in the nose, and you're pretty sure the force of your foot against his lip against his teeth cut his mouth. You, at the same time, are falling backwards, but you use the foot you kicked with to plant behind you, making you able to stop yourself from falling with considerable leg and back straining. You can hear your knee make a wet pop under the tension, but you shake it off and switch your stances to prepare for Dave getting up.

His next swing at you is clumsy, allowing you just step out of the way entirely. The way he followed through made him look like he was about to fall over. You strike before he's able to regain his balance, leaving a thin, shallow cut across his torso. There goes that shirt. He winces and hisses in pain, clutching at the area with his free hand. "Fuck," he says.

You remind him to be alert by flash stepping behind him and delivering a sharp blow to his back with your elbow. He spins around in an adrenaline-fueled second wind, but he's too disoriented to even block your swings, so you let him fall to his knees, clutching the area that's oozing blood. You don't even deign the end of the strife worthy of the symbolic kill gesture, instead sheathing your sword and helping him up, walking him to the door where you drag him downstairs.

You sit him in the bathroom, on the toilet, head leaning against the wall looking absolutely defeated while you grab the supplies you need from the medicine cabinet. It's a tight squeeze, but you manage to fit yourself in between him and the shower, giving you the room you need to patch up the cut on his chest.

You take off your gloves, and he looks at you like he's mystified to see it. "Take off your shirt," you say while washing your hands, and he complies. The collar skews his shades when it rubs past them, so he takes them off and holds onto them in his lap. You snatch the shirt from him, and press it to his chest firmly as you kneels down in front of him.

You hold the shirt there like that for a few minutes, just waiting for the cut to stop bleeding. It's not very deep, but it's long and diagonal across his chest. He tips his head back probably just to avoid looking at you, clutching the shades in his hands. He looks like a wreck without them, his eyes betraying his unwillingness to look at you, his hands betraying his frustration, and his drunkenness prohibiting him from doing anything about either of these things.

After the wound stops bleeding for the most part, you grab the towel hanging on the shower door, wetting it in the sink, and rub soap into it. You rub the towel across the cut, seeing Dave wince slightly as you do. When you're done, you toss the towel on the floor and grab the neosporin-like stuff, squeezing it out along the cut spreading it with your fingertips.

"I wish you wouldn't fucking do that," he says, nearly shuddering under your touch, Jesus christ, you wish _he_ wouldn't do _that_ , looking like you could wreck him if you wanted to, and hell, you probably can, not that he would mind at all. The thought sends a little wake up call to your dick. You don't need this right now. That isn't the message you should be sending right now.

You keep quiet, watching the way his torso moves when he breathes, made up of wiry muscles and scar-riddled skin, all of which were from you over the years. He's tried to build muscle like you, but he just gets more definition than bulk. He's attractive, to say the least. The way he looks at you doesn't help, because the thing deep inside you that longs for control and power tells you he's exactly what you want, exactly what you need, which makes you that much more certain that fucking him would be a mistake.

You reach for the wound tape and the small scissors, cutting small strips and laying them perpendicularly along the cut. "You want to talk about what you said earlier?" You ask, trying to sound comforting, but you think it might come off as a little condescending. You can't do the whole 'sensitive' thing.

"The gay bars part or the part where I admitted that I want you to fuck my brains out?" Dave asks with a sardonic edge to his voice.

"I'm not trying to attack you here," you say. Not verbally, you mean. You already finished your fight.

"There's nothing to talk about. I like you, it's wrong, we'll pretend I never said it and everything will be fine," he says. His face is caught halfway between mortified and no longer giving a shit.

You get the gauze from the sink, and begin covering the wound. "You know why it's wrong?" It feels like you're talking to a child, which maybe you should think about the fact that Dave is, technically, your child, but you've never liked the idea of parenting, making it feel like one big ironic farce.

"Socially unacceptable, and I mean man, the babies. Can't risk all those inbreeding deformities that comes with incest," he says, again being facetious.

"Yeah, well you could argue that incest is all fine and ethical so long as babies are left out of the picture," you say, taping the end of the gauze to itself so that it stays in place and is pulled taut. You glance up as you say it, and it's a mistake because you can see right into his eyes, where there's an obvious glimmer of hope. _Fuck, not what I meant_. "But the real issue is family dynamics. Shit is breeding grounds for power imbalance issues."

Youare a neon sign of power imbalance issues. You just need him to know that you are the bad guy in this situation, that your own fucked up psychological profile will be what destroys you both if you don't have some self control. You are, at your very core, a puppet master. The way Dave looks at you now, you can see how much he's hanging onto your every word, looking at you like he's god damn desperate and it's killing you. By telling you, he's given you power. He is putting everything in your hands, and it's taking all the self control in the world not to use it. You're afraid to say that you're tempted to lean forward and kiss him, give him everything that he wants, and you know, it's more than just finding you attractive. It's a deep kind of longing, and it's eating away at the dark thing inside you that wants to have control. You're tempted for all the wrong reasons.

"Why are you telling me?" Dave asks as you gather the supplies you've left around, organizing them and putting them back into the medicine cabinet.

"Because you need to understand," you say. You need him to understand that you are not what he wants, not what he needs in a romantic partner.

"Point fucking taken, now can we get out of here or what?" He asks.

You ignore his question. "Find someone your own age, will you?" You ask. You think it's a reasonable request, something you should say as a guardian, another forced, trite way of protecting him.

He stares at you for a moment, before saying, "You don't fucking get it, do you?" You stare back at him in response. "I can't find someone my own age, much less find someone else at all, because they're not you. And believe me, it's not for lack of trying." He still hasn't put on his shades, his face completely readable to you. There's a spark of anger in his eyes, and his lip has a miniscule twitch in disgust at himself. He's a wonder where you went wrong, what you did to make him like this.

Your brain is waging an internal war against itself; your conscience is sending waves of guilt at you because there's another part of you that loves the sound of desperation in Dave's voice. You're attracted to his desperation, for fuck's sake. If that doesn't make you sick, you don't know what does.

Except for maybe the fact that you find yourself walking back over to him, leaning down to press your lips to his. He shakes slightly against you, unsure of himself and unsure what you're doing. He raises his hands to hover near your torso, but doesn't dare touch you until you're parting his lips with your tongue, deepening the kiss and sliding your own hands against his bare hips and back. His lips taste like salt and iron from where one of them was split. He pulls you closer and tries to hold your bodies together like the mere thought of electrons separating you scares him, and you're falling in love with the way he kisses like he will never be able to kiss you again.

And there it is, in the front of your mind; the knowledge that you will do this again, and again and again, despite your inevitably futile attempts at self control, because you've already lost the battle. Kissing him is a mistake that will lead to so much more, a chain reaction that you are as good as powerless to stop. It's a domino effect, fundamental physics in the transfer of energy, that one process leads to another through a long chain of interconnectedness and dependency on this very first choice to give into temptation. It's a classic tale, and one in which you have found yourself to be the monster, or perhaps the tragic hero, not that it matters either way. Your choice gave Dave hope, which will only serve to feed the more perverse part of your mind, battling out against your conscience, as it loses more every time. Before this decision, there was potential, the potential for an infinite number of things to occur, and afterwards, you're left with the product of an irreversible process, the entropy of the universe increased as that potential is destroyed, setting you on a path of inevitability and rightfully balancing the surroundings of the system with could-haves and should-haves. Your system moves towards order as the world around you moves to a state closer to disorder. It's basic thermodynamics.

You realize how ridiculously dramatic you're being and shut that shit down with a mental iron fist. You only allow yourself to be amused for a very short moment by the fact that this emotional shift demonstrates a basic energy transfer by its very nature, from dramatic inner monologue to… less dramatic inner monologue. See, you're shutting this shit down, before you're lost in your head with bullshit about inevitability and entropy and limitless possibilities.

You're kissing Dave, and it's probably one of the greatest feelings in the world. It's been a long time since you've been sexually involved with anyone, mostly because you've had other things to do, what with a kid and jobs and whatnot. But this, even this is different with anything you've had in the past ten years, because he clings to you like he'll collapse if you leave him and kisses you like you'll disappear if he doesn't. His hands dig into your back and you thread a hand through his hair in return. His eyes open, trying to read your face and see through your shades. The almost eye contact should make it all feel too intense for you, but instead it sends a jolt to your dick and makes you smirk against Dave's mouth.

When you break the kiss, one of his hands grips a handful of the back of your shirt, like he could honestly keep you there if he wanted to. Jesus, kid, you were going to pass out if you kept on going like that. You need oxygen at some point.

He rests his head where your neck meets your shoulder. "Fuck," he mutters against your skin.

You run your fingers up and down his spine, your other hand rubbing the base of his skull, running through the short hair there. He takes a moment to move the shades in his lap, but still holds onto you the entire time. You start kissing him again, his mouth opening easily for you, letting your tongue inside as he claws down your back. One of his hands moves down to your hip, and he slyly brings it down to palm at your erection through his jeans. You break the kiss, but he doesn't stop.

"This isn't what you want," you say, grabbing his hand. Of course it's what he wants, but it isn't what he needs. He needs someone who isn't twice his age, someone who isn't his brother, someone who didn't raise him, someone who would fuck him for anything other than how much he needs you. You know he won't say no, though, and maybe it shouldn't ease your conscience because of that, but it does.

"Fuck you, I know what I want," he says. You don't let yourself smirk at that. Instead, you rest your hand at the small of his back and use the other to get leverage underneath his knee. He takes the hint as you lift him, hanging on to you and wrapping his legs around you.

You lay him down on his own bed, where he uses the legs around you as leverage to pull you closer to him. He has a look in his eyes that says he's getting exactly what he wants, but really, you think, you're not letting him do a thing you don't want him to do. You straddle his legs, your own on either side of his, looming over him with a hand by his shoulder. He reaches his hand up to remove your hat and then your shades, which you take from him and set on the table to your right.

Dave leans up to kiss you, and you suck at the mark left by some other douchebag earlier tonight, red and purple and marring the pale skin beneath you. You make it yours, if just to assuage the feeling that bubbles up inside you that makes you want to kill whoever did this to him. Dave lets out shaky breaths as you do, hands fumbling around your belt, trying to get it undone. Your hands go to the button of his jeans, which you make quick work of and yank his zipper down just as he starts to tug at yours. You palm at his dick through the opening in his jeans, hand rubbing against the material of his boxers. A moan escapes from his lips and he moves his hips into the touch. He doesn't wait to get your pants down, just slips his hand beneath the hem of your underwear and takes your dick in his hand.

You lift his hips so that you can shove his pants and underwear down around his thighs, reaching your hand back, cupping his ass. He leans up to suck at your bottom lip, his hand working itself around your erection, before he lies flush against the bed, hand running down your back, over the material of your shirt.

His hand moves away from your dick and he dips his hand up under the hem of your shirt. "Are you ever planning on getting naked or am I just getting my hopes up?" He asks, his fingers tickling your abdomen.

You roll your eyes, before sitting up and removing your shirt, tossing it somewhere in the middle of his room. You decide it actually might be worth it to get off the bed in order to shed your pants and boxer briefs in one quick motion, and Dave takes the opportunity to kick his the rest of the way off and to the floor beside his bed. You get back on top of him, now lying completely naked beneath you. He explores your chest with his hands, tracing scars and the lines of your abs. He traces down to the insides of your thighs, and he leans up, trying to bring his head closer to his body, but his eyes squeeze close when he tries, so he lies back on the bed.

"Some asshole gave me this massive cut," he explains, hand on his own chest, covered with gauze.

Your fingers whisper across his torso, bringing them down to where you give his cock a teasing stroke. "Someone thought it was a good idea to fight drunk," you say, punctuating it by rubbing your thumb over the slit of his dick, making his hips buck.

"That was you, I didn't want to do jack shit drunk, but hey," he says, and you cut him off with a kiss before he can say anything else. You angle your hips to align his cock against yours, rubbing them together. Dave lets out a satisfied hum, before pistoning his hips to try and get friction against yours. You wrap your hand as far as you can get it around both, slowly rolling your hips up to let your cocks rub together.

Dave props himself up on his elbows and smirks. "Fuck me," he says, looking straight into your eyes, making you just about lose it. You hope he never knows what he's doing to you.

You weren't even supposed to kiss him, much less be rubbing your dicks together. It's an easy enough question to answer, and you're glad because it doesn't make you feel guilty at all. "No," you say, frankly, spitting on your palm and spreading it on your dicks, trying to wet them.

"There's lube in my pockets," Dave says, reaching off the bed in a feeble gesture towards the floor.

"Answer's still no," you say as you reach down to rifle through his pant pockets, fishing out the little bottle with your torso pressed up against his as you do.

Dave looks indignant, but you manage to wipe the look off of his face when you slick up your dicks, rubbing the heads and massaging down the shafts. As you close the cap and toss the bottle off the bed somewhere, you make a sudden movement of your hips, fucking into your hand against his dick, making him let out a low moan that makes you want to attack his lips with your own, sucking his lips and licking into his mouth in time with the thrusts of your hips. His hand joins yours around your shafts at some point, and he rocks his hips beneath you. You're annoyed when you come first, striping Dave's stomach with white, but he's not far behind, panting and tensing beneath you.

When you both come to your senses, Dave is smirking like he's won something. It doesn't even bother you, because you know that his smugness only gives you an advantage. You feel the familiar pit of guilt building in your stomach, creeping dully back into the edges of your mind. You get up, feeling Dave reflexively reach for you. You go to the bathroom and get a washcloth, wet it, and bring it back to Dave's room after giving yourself a preliminary wipedown. You clean the come off his stomach, refusing to look into his eyes for fear that the full impact of what you've just done will hit you if you meet them.

If he's looking for some kind of affection, you don't give it to him. Instead, you leave with you clothes tucked underneath your arm, you hat on and shades replaced, the damp washcloth in you hand. You leave him in his room for the night, wordlessly, hoping that maybe he'll change his mind about all of this. Maybe next time he'll say no so that you don't have to feel that overwhelming need to take control.

A smuppet catches your eye near the futon when you dump your clothes on the floor. It's beady eyes stare up at you with judgement, as if to say _You're a bad man, Mr. Strider._ You know that already. You're also completely fucked.


	3. Le Petit Mort

**Le Petit Mort**

" _Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."_

― _Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita_

Pain. There is pain everywhere, dull and aching, and you don't want to move at all. You're lying in your bed, naked, your body refusing to move or breathe. You feebly try to go back to sleep, but you're up already. You silently hope today is Saturday, and recollect what you can from the night before… oh. Yeah, it's Saturday.

You wonder if maybe the entire night was just a hazy, half-drunken dream that blurred into reality, maybe there's a chance you came home fine and just passed out on your bed. But your muscles ache in the way they always do the day after a strife, and your chest stings and itches like a motherfucker. When your hand brushes up against your chest, you confirm that there is gauze stretched over it, and your heart sinks with the realization that everything last night was real. Half of you is celebrating, dangling bells and letting the Hallelujahs ring out, but the reality of the situation is quickly catching up. You've just crossed a threshold you can't uncross, and you don't have a fucking clue what the hell Bro is thinking. There's a very good chance he's just fucking with you for the hell of it. Hell, maybe he'll even pass it off as some sort of valuable life lesson to be learned, like it excuses him at all. There's a familiar pit in your stomach, only this time it isn't guilt, but a horrible feeling that you've made a terrible mistake.

Your phone buzzes somewhere near your bed, but like hell you're going to get up just to find it. It's probably Karkat making up an adorable excuse to see you like he actually needs one, or it's John telling you his dad is dumb for whatever reason it is today. Or maybe it's Rose, her weird freudian powers tingling, knowing that you and your brother did _something_. She'd smile with wisdom, and proclaim herself the great Sibyl of Incest, seer of all that is perverse and thoroughly fucked up. You've been trying to deny your obsession with Bro to her for years, and she still won't let up. You barely even talk about him except in passing, so you don't know what the hell got the right idea in her head.

You finally muster up the willpower to check your phone, rolling onto your side to potentially find it by the side of your bed where your pants are. You find it, but as you're leaning over the side you look forward to see the discarded bottle of lube from last night, and it seems almost comical just sitting there, as if it could be staring back at you, confirming your actions and by extension, your stupidity.

You roll back onto your bed, now suddenly exhausted once more from the effort. You have a bunch of Pesterchum notifications from Karkat, and the numbers on the screen inform you that it's currently 12:27.

 **CG: HEY IDIOT**

 **CG: FUCKFACE**

 **CG: SUPREME BULGEWAD, KING OF ALL THAT IS AWFUL AND PATHETICALLY USELESS**

 **CG: TAINT-CHAFING ASSBAG SON-OF-A WEASEL-EATING PROSTITUTE**

 **CG: DAVE MOTHERFUCKING STRIDER**

 **CG: THIS IS ABSOLUTELY USELESS ISN'T IT. I AM REALLY NOT IN THE FUCKING MOOD TO SIT ON MY ASS ALL DAY AT HOME TO BE BERATED BY MY BRAINLESS HAVOC-WREAKING PISS POOR EXCUSE FOR A LUSUS, SO PLEASE FUCKING ANSWER ME BEFORE I RIP MY OWN FUCKING THINKPAN OUT OF IT'S RESTING PLACE INSIDE MY SKULL.**

 **TG: naw man im here whats up**

 **CG: FINALLY, YOU DEIGN ME WORTHY OF YOUR PRESENCE. I AM ABSOLUTELY FUCKING HONORED BY YOUR GENEROSITY, OH GREAT BENEVOLENT LORD OF FUCK YOU.**

 **TG: dude chill i just woke up**

 **TG: still in my jammies and shit**

 **CG: OKAY FIRST OF ALL, HOW THE HELL CAN YOU SLEEP UNTIL NOON? AREN'T YOU HUMANS SUPPOSED TO BE DIURNAL? IT TOOK TIME TO ADJUST TO THIS STUPID FUCKING SLEEPING SCHEDULE, AND HERE YOU ARE FUCKING IT RIGHT IN THE ASS WITH YOUR COMPLETE AND UTTER INABILITY TO CONFORM TO YOUR OWN SPECIES' EVOLUTIONARY CONVENTIONS. AND WHO THE ACTUAL FUCK SAYS "JAMMIES?"**

 **TG: i went to sleep at like four**

 **TG: and i say jammies you weenie**

 **TG: but really im just saying that to spare your delicate sensibilities**

 **TG: im straight up naked  
TG: i think the jammies goblin took my clothes in the night like the creepy kleptomaniac sad sack of dicks he is**

 **TG: i loved those jammies too man**

 **CG: WOW, SHUT THE FUCK UP. I WAS THINKING OF ASKING YOU TO DO SOMETHING ALONG THE LINES OF "HANGING OUT" BUT I SUPPOSE THAT WOULD BE PUTTING TOO MUCH FAITH IN OUR FRIENDSHIP. I REQUEST YOUR PRESENCE, STRIDER, AS SAD AND PITIFULLY LONELY AS THAT IS.**

 **TG: aw karkles i knew you liked me all along *fucking swoon***

 **TG: should i be expecting flowers and saccharine declarations of love?**

 **TG: if you buy me dinner i might even be willing to watch one of your shitty romcoms**

 **TG: and afterwards ill be tearing up because the love is just too much**

 **TG: youll be a total hardass eyes fucking dry as the sahara desert**

 **TG: but youll put a hand on my cheek and tell me our love can be the same**

 **TG: and at that point everyones staring bc im actually bawling like a lil bitch**

 **TG: but it was actually a ploy to touch my human boobs?**

 **TG: what a surprising turn of events**

 **TG: i knew you only loved me for my looks**

 **CG: ACTUALLY, YOU KNOW WHAT? FUCK IT, I RESCIND MY PREVIOUS STATEMENTS. I'M TAKING THEM RIGHT THE FUCK BACK AND YOU CAN GO FUCK YOURSELF. THERE'S ONLY SO MUCH BULLSHIT I CAN DEAL WITH AND YOUR ENTIRE EXISTENCE IS BASICALLY AKIN TO THAT OF AN INCONTINENT HOOFBEASTS ANUS. I DON'T KNOW HOW I EVER IMAGINE THAT THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT. DO I JUST PSYCHE MYSELF INTO THINKING "NO, IT'S OKAY, HE WON'T BE THE UNIVERSE'S BIGGEST GRUBFUCKER TODAY. JUST THIS ONCE?"**

 **TG: whatever im down to chill**

 **CG: FUCKING FANTASTIC.**

 **TG: i can pick you up soonish but im actually naked so youre gonna have to give me time to put clothes on etc.**

 **CG: I WASN'T GOING TO MENTION IT EARLIER, BUT YOU REALLY HAVE TO STOP IMPLANTING THAT HORRIFIC VISUAL IN MY MIND.**

 **TG: please im hot and you know it**

 **TG: bitches be up in my grill all the time**

 **TG: they just cant get enough of me and it can be all hells of inconvenient too like excuse me i have shit to do i cant be carrying around these bitches everywhere**

 **TG: these pants are for your protection karkat**

 **CG: YOU'RE ABSOLUTELY HELPLESS, AREN'T YOU?**

 **TG: whatever you love it**

Thankful for the distraction, you pry yourself out of bed. Everything is sore and your chest still hurts, but you're more than willing to have an excuse to get out of the apartment, away from the potential to find Bro lurking in the living room. You're not ready to talk about what happened last night, or since Bro is a man of little words, try to decipher the subtext of everything he says, the calculated and precise crudeness that he's always spoken with. You got sick of the ridiculous mind games ages ago.

You quickly pull on some clothes from your closet, ignoring how much your body is pestering you about being gentle with it's dull aches. You quickly put on your shoes and pocket your phone before heading to the bathroom, where you find your shades (as if you needed yet another reminder), vaguely fix your hair, quickly put on deodorant, and disapprove of the very obvious purple bruise on the side of your neck. You can't get rid of it, and hiding it would probably make it more obvious if anything, so you leave it and hope Karkat doesn't make a big fucking deal about it, which is putting a lot of faith in Karkat's willingness to be polite. Your eyes look like shit beneath your shades, but with them your face looks almost normal, concealing most of the evidence of you being kicked last night, and the heavy bags under your eyes from a built up lack of sleep and usual exhaustion. While you're at it, you pop a couple Advil in your mouth and hope it'll take care of the minor headache and pain in your chest. It itches like crazy underneath the gauze, but there's not much you can do about that.

When you go out to the living room, you can't see Bro, so you snatch your keys from somewhere amongst the din of your kitchen counter and slip out as quickly as possible. There's no way to know if he's out for sure unless Lil Cal and Bro's equipment are gone, and he doesn't ever take the stuff in the middle of the day unless he's travelling somewhere, in which case you would have seen a stack of cash somewhere in the apartment to take care of yourself. He never tells you when he's going to leave, you just come home or wake up to find him gone, leaving you to work out how many days he'll be gone based on how much he gave you. Anyway, Bro might be here, and he might not, so you don't risk it and get the fuck out of there before you even have a chance of confronting him.

Karkat only lives about fifteen minutes away, even in the post-lunch hour traffic. You pull up the driveway to his hive in the middle of a mostly-troll suburb, and then shoot him a quick pester telling him to get his ass out here. Three minutes later, Karkat emerges with trademarked messy hair and long sleeves even though it's late September and almost ninety degrees out.

"Where to?" You ask as he gets into the passenger seat.

"Anywhere but here," he says. "My lusus is going shithive maggots."

"Lunch? I haven't eaten since lunch yesterday and I'm having some mad hunger, yo," you say, turning the ignition and backing out of Karkat's driveway.

"Fine, but you do realize you only had a bag of chips and that vile swill you call apple juice yesterday? How are you still standing?" He asks, with concerned snark.

"I'm like Gandhi, dude," you say.

"An extremely underweight vegetarian seeking the liberation of India?" Karkat asks.

"To a T, dude," you say.

You pull into a relatively cheap restaurant that caters to both trolls and humans. Most restaurants do, but oftentimes they're more skewed one way or the other, and some just have the little box at the bottom of the menu for the idiots that don't like the food but came to the place anyway. Some troll places have actually labelled the human sections as such, which has led to more than a few humans being scandalized and throwing a royal fit about it, usually ending up somewhere in the news if you look deep enough.

"You look like shit," Karkat says after you both have your menus and a rather annoying green troll waitress takes your drink orders with the most forced Texan accent you have ever heard.

"Love you, too," you say, making yourself busy with the menu. You realize at this point that you don't even care what you eat, so long as it's food.

"Hey, Sweethearts, would ya like anything ta drink?" The waitress asks, slathering her words in possibly the most atrocious Texan accent you have ever heard. She smiles with too many fangs and she has the neck muscles of a god. Not surprising, given her gargantuan horns, but everything she does makes her like like she's trying way too hard to fit in with humans.

You and Karkat both order, but he's more visibly balking at her, and you're pretty sure his glare has somehow hurt her feelings.

"I think you made her cry," you say as she walks away.

"I didn't, she's fine," he says, crossing his arms over his chest.

"You're going to feel bad and drown your sorrows in Fall Out Boy later, aren't you?" You ask, raising your eyebrows. You'd almost forgotten that you face hurt that much on your right side.

You feel a sharp kick to your shin under the table. "Better than the shit you listen to," he says.

"What have I played around you? N.W.A. and the Wu-Tang Clan? Are you saying the revolutionaries of rap, the ultimate classics, are shit? Because if you are, you better fuckin be able to beat Ice Cube in a rap battle," you say, as the waitress comes back with your drinks and the pad waiters always use to take orders.

"Well, consider me utterly schooled on the concept of rap. Not like it's a completely inane and irrelevant art form," Karkat hisses from across the table, garnering a stern and confused look from the waitress, who continues to try to break her own face with the size of her smile.

You and Karkat finally order, and you even manage to get Karkat to smile back at her.

"I can get you into some cool Norwegian bands if you want," Dave says.

"I can't even tell when you're joking or not anymore," he sighs. "The irony thing from your brother is kind of a huge pain in the ass, have I told you?"

The mention of Bro makes you go stiff. Not that kind of stiff, either, you realize. You're on edge about the whole thing, you know you're going to have to go home and deal with that. "I'm pretty sure you never shut your flapping windhole about it," you say, trying to pass of your weird hesitation.

Karkat lowers his eyebrows. "Are you okay?" he asks, rather sullen all of the sudden. "Because I'm pretty sure you just had an emotion."

"Wow, yes, thank you, I am capable of having those occasionally," you say.

"I'm watching you," he says.

The two of you don't talk about much before your food comes. You scarf down your food, practically inhaling it, while Karkat picks at his at his usual slow pace. You're done long before he's even halfway through, so you sit, just watching him eat, hoping it isn't that weird to do so.

"You have a massive hickey on your neck. I've been trying not to mention it, but it's been fucking staring at me this entire time," Karkat says.

"Yeah, what about it?" You ask, crossing your arms, leaning on the table.

"Why?" He asks, as a piece of his strange troll food disappears into his mouth.

"Someone got a little carried away, you know, all the bitches can't keep themselves in line all the time. Shit happens," you say, trying to avoid having to explain anything. Thinking about it makes you remember Bro's mouth on your neck, his hands all over you, his eyes staring down above you, dark orange and still somehow overpowering in their nakedness. You swear to Christ, you are not going to get a fucking boner right now.

"Please, shroud yourself in more mystery. It's not like you need to be any more of a douchebag, not like I'm your best and only friend within a 1000 mile radius or anything," he says, rolling his eyes at you.

"You don't know them," you say, because after three years knowing this guy, you can't even remember if he knows you're gay or not. You're starting to realize Karkat might have a point about the whole mystery thing.

"I don't know _you_ , assface," he says.

The waitress had apparently taken Karkat's artificial smile as interest, so she slipped her number behind the receipt for the bill, writing her name with little hearts around it. You absently wonder if the hate-romance thing works the same way with trolls, but you doubt Karkat would answer you without a brutal, boring discourse on the more finite details of troll romance.

"What, you didn't like the Texan twang?" You tease, poking at the little slip with her number.

"It's bad enough being around you," he says.

"I do not have an accent," you say back.

"Listen to yourself sometime. And I meant it's bad enough being around you, the king of all idiots. Please, tell me why I need one more in my life?" He says as the two of you slip out of the booth.

"Aw, you like me," you say, which earns a sturdy punch to your shoulder.

It's late when Bro gets home, a few hours after you've said goodbye to Karkat, an hour after you said hi John, right in the middle of watching something on TV you don't really care about. He plants himself on the other side of the futon, fitting into it like it was built for him. He does that with everything; he makes it seem like the world is his, at his command and completely focused on him. He does it with you, dimming the rest of the world around him, making it so that he's the only thing you can focus on. You look at him because there's nothing else to look at.

"What do you want," he asks, not even looking at you, just seeing you staring out of the corner of your eyes. Your heart feels like it's pumping acid, sending a sick feeling coursing through your body. At the same time, you're tempted to curl up next to him, cling to him for dear life like a child, and somewhere deep down, you know that's because you're supposed to be his kid.

"We gonna get dinner?" You ask, matching his abrasive tone, resisting the urge to launch yourself at him like one of Jade's Squiddle toys.

Bro shrugs. "You know where the phone is," he says.

You can feel his eyes following you when you get up. Your legs feel clunky and awkward under his gaze, your movements unsure. You grab the phone, look at him, and ask, "What do you want?"

He stares at you in response, so you go ahead and pick the Greek place that does deliveries, ordering both of your usuals.

"Come here," Bro says as you set the phone on the kitchen counter. You walk over to the futon slowly, because you have that instinctual fear telling you he might attack you at any moment.

You stand in front of him, between his knees, looking down at him on the futon, and somehow feeling smaller than him. He does that with everything. He plants his hands on your hips, holding you, staring at you. You think you're learning what it's like to be unravelled from the inside.

He runs his hand up your torso, over your shirt, up to where his fingers touch gauze.

"Is it bothering you?" He asks calmly, running his thumb along the line where the gauze sits. His touch feels tender, intimate, caring. He's making a transition from unaffected to loving, and you know you shouldn't trust that, somewhere you know that he's fucking with you. You want to melt into his touch so badly. You need him to care about you, even if you have to shut the parts of your brain telling you this is a bad idea.

"No," you say, almost under your breath, reaching to take grab his hand at your chest. You wish you were saying no to him, not just his question. Maybe he wasn't even asking about the cut. You don't care, you melt into his touch, feeling yourself become utterly lost in his presence.

He pulls you in closer, and you half want to climb into his lap before you realize you're not that much smaller than he is. You have to force yourself to remember you're not a virgin, you're not a kid, you could be his equal. You could, but you aren't. You put a hand on his shoulder and lean down to kiss him, lightly, your knee pressing into the fabric of the futon between his legs, letting go of his hand as he moves it to your back.

Kissing is a strange action by itself; it's just tongue and lips and spit and the taste of flesh, never much more than that. Everyone you've ever kissed has just been a substitute, a stand-in for Bro. You've only ever kissed out of sheer desperation and blind lust, as an expected precursor to what comes next. Right now, with Bro, it feels like you're getting an answer of some kind, to a question you didn't know you asked. He doesn't smell like much, just a vague hint of soap. You wonder if he smells too similar to you; you're related and living together. A day's worth of stubble scratches across your chin as Bro sucks your bottom lip in between his own, pulling you closer, drawing you in. You reach up to push your shades to the top of your head, careful not to break contact with his lips. You've never kissed someone like this before. It's comforting, at least temporarily, sending a wave of relief washing over your body. You don't need to focus on anything else; the world is dim around you. There's only him.

And then there's the knock on the door, whether it's minutes or seconds later. Bro gently pushes you off of him, getting up from the futon to go fish out his wallet and pay the delivery guy. When he comes back, the room is filled with the smell of gyros. You sit where you sat when he first came home, on the other side of the futon. He sets the bag of food between you, letting you take out your own polystyrene container and plastic fork as he sits down. Bro takes his own food as you begin to eat. He switches the TV over to your ridiculously old VCR, and soon the sounds of shoe-shining and an eighties beat replace the silence.

 _Whoa, oh-oh-oh, let's get on over to Pryor's Place_

 _Oh oh, we're gonna party, so don't be late_

There's a sudden slip back into normalcy, watching TV with Bro, not worrying about what he thinks or what he'll say, just being near him. For the first time in a very long time, you feel safe. You feel comfortable. And when he jerks you off that night, you face buried in his neck, you think things might actually be okay.


End file.
